Posted in 2012

I never came to post this one – I guess that the ending of a year might be a good momentum for almost anything, I must say that it is far from original (I know), but it is an attempt to talk about a thing (libraries) without explicitly mentioning the name (all the time). Another reason to write this was that I do not want to play a defensive role; I want to take another approach. Inspired by (I do watch the telly when working in a hotel room) The Richard Dimbleby Lecture (BBC, 28-02-2012), Ken Robinson‘s TED talk on Changing the education paradigms, Steven Johnson‘s Where good things come from and Thomas Friedman (2011. That used to be us.).

I found this nice picture of TU Delft Library on Arvind Jayashankar’s weblog.

So finally I sat down to it. In a hotel room in a Birmingham, February 28th, almost 29th, 2012. I decided that I should now put down the framework and that this framework could be transformed into something wilder, or deeper, or more.

The whole idea is that we all are working to make the world a better place. Surely we as being people working in science. And good science needs good sustainable support.

What is it that science, the scientists, the students, the research&developers of our companies and anyone else involved in science need to make this world a better place? Let us assume that they work in a university or company or study at a place where the basic elements such as their lab facility, a stable state-of-the-art ict infrastructure, and things as their salary or for students their exams and classes are being facilitated. But what could make the difference?

Firstly they all need access to see what already has been done, to proceed where no-one has gone before, and to understand what could go wrong. To study as a new learner or to gain deeper insights in new fields or being a life-long learner. Access for others to their own production and products (articles, labdata, software, experimental settings, videos, images, blogs) if possible, so that they themselves and/or their institute or company are “recognized”. Viewing the latest weblectures from anywhere they decide to be because that is the place they can best carry out their research, thinking, talking or just offers the best studyplace.

And not just access would do, real science means the possibility to dig deeper, to understand more, to repeat your experiments, to link to possible bypasses and go on. That takes time, it takes patience, it takes talent and it costs some. It means thoroughness or richness, posing and opposing theories and getting fundamental discussions that might end nowhere, but sometimes mean it all. To read and learn from your suggested books, but finding that this is not enough, doing extra assignments, taking up special projects, being curious and being proud of it. Knowing that you can find your stuff in journals, via databases, and ebooks, but enriching your playground with other inspiration via TV, film, podcasts, music, websites or magazines.

And nobody can make the world a better place just on his own. You need others, you need criticism, you need serendipity, you need to meet your peers. Of course you can travel to your congresses, but you also need this meeting point nearby. It is a sort of access point, but a physical one. You can drink your coffee, tea, juice, go through some magazines, talk and meet with both the PhD or colleague you know from your department, but also the people you accidently bump into, the lecturer you at last can ask that one question, to attend “just-nice-to-know” or “hey-isn’t-that-sort-of-what-I-am-doing” events and watch the news, not on your stand-alone tablet, but sharing the experience with others. You might get some advice from experts, e.g. about writing or publishing or how things work with intellectual property at that place. Any doubts you might have on ethical issues in your research or other practice can be shared with peers and debates are encouraged.

You also use this space to see your business relations and vice versa. And will it make the world a better place? The best ideas know their origin in places like these. Let’s call it acquaintance. A healthy economy is not just driven by greater efficiency, but also by people inventing more goods and services. And people need inspiration to come to innovation.
So we have had access, richness, and acquaintance as basics needs for science to prosper. Let’s add one final one to this, and this is progress. That is what science (and the people working on and in it) adds to the world, right?
And if we need to think of the good sustainable support to accommodate this, what is it we think about? Who might be able to provide access to the latest results, and can help you gain visibility? To make sure that the research can be done thoroughly? Facilitate a space to meet up with your study, business or research acquaintances? Hear and see what you have not heard before? Where everything breathes progress?It is the Library. What else. To make the world a better place.<The English words are perhaps a bit farfedged – I could not find better words for the four Dutch ones “toegang, diepgang, omgang & vooruitgang”>

Blog views as per June 25, 2013: 1039. After that date post was migrated to this new url.

On October 17, 2012 I was invited to attend and speak at the symposium organised by the CIUP on the creative campus. My topic was about the transformation process of TU Delft Library to a Library Learning Centre and our steps into implementing this concept further into the campus, as a Living Campus.

Let me first tell something about CIUP, because I had not heard about it before. This institute has an enormous campus/park where students from different universities and colleges in Paris occupy houses. It was founded in the early 1920s and the origin of this campus was to prevent another civil world war, just after the first world war – by making sure that the groups of different nations would work and live together. The Cité Internationale’s 40 houses welcome some 10,000 residents a year, including students, researchers, visiting professors, artists and sportsmen from over 140 countries. It has both accommodation and a wide range of services (featuring a theatre, library, restaurant, sports facilities, support services and more). The Cité’s park spans 34 hectares and is home to the most extensive range of student accommodation in the Paris region.

I tried to visit the Dutch College but it was under construction. It is considered one of the masterpieces of architecture in the Cité internationale. It is the only building in France designed by Willem Marinus Dudok, one of the leading architects from the Dutch school of the 1920s and 30s.

According to Beverly Margaria, director for student services at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, the institute is not just about housing. It wants to help their students to understand each other. They should talk about this utopia once they go back to their homes, and have a different view of the world. They “provide people with wellbeing”.

The library at CIUP (I did not visit!).

The meeting was an intense one, in total 80 people attended, ranging from urban architects, philosophers, projectleaders, university support staff and so on. Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, from OECD, talked about student mobility and the future of student housing: growth of demand, growth of short stay and offering new services. His statement: “We are moving away from the idea that the campus is separate & isolated, where people are exclusively set aside to meet and think.”

Louise Béliveau, vice-rector for student affairs and sustainable development at the University of Montreal, explored a study they carried out in 2009, in which the excellently-rated student services turned out to be relatively poorly used. She told us what the university has done to improve this. We met the night before – Louise helped me during dinner because my French was not fluent enough and we could talk English.

For me the best talk was given by Joon-Seek Lee from the Seoul National University (I asked later, he was from the IT department). The title of his talk was: “I’m a university – self-directed online learning behavior research @snu”. SNU recently changed their digital learning environment from Blackboard to Moodle. And he wondered how long Moodle would last. Students are mixing and matching online tools to cover their diverse learning activities, and what the university does is just a fragment of what they use. Students make their own learning paths, and structure their own education. SNU carried out a research with 200 students and found interesting stuff. Their students use multiple devices simultaneously; the students do not explore content outside of their inner circle; and use exploring tools a lot and learn socially with a free (instant) messenger.

Alain Bourdin, from l’Institut français d’urbanisme and codirector Lab’Urba, did a wrap-up of the day. He had a somewhat philosophical ending. He noticed that we were all planning according to the path we know. We should understand that the way we use and circulate knowledge will change in 20 years’ time. He also mentioned the difference in time. Routine time (e.g. taking courses) is a different type of time than intense (or highlights) time. The places where we do this are also diferent. The Rolex Centre from Lausanne (which was also a topic of the day, just before my own presentation) is an intermediate thing in between the two different sets. We must enter the next game, what will tomorrow’s universities look like?

Blog views as per June 25, 2013: 720. After that date post was migrated to this new url.

Well I don’t know. I had a great day Friday October 5, 2012 @tedxdelft. I enjoyed a huge part of the lectures, I listened, thought a lot, and was afraid/ashamed to work at the happening itself, so I checked out, and got back again, and missed Pim the flowerist, and am very sorry about that. I also had my doubts about the Mars mission, thought that the “wiskundemeisje” could have taken more time, would have loved to have a discussion on the “diversity and inclusion” concept, wondered what lecture last year was also constructed around the mindmapping storytelling, as Wendy did this year, and … well you could argue that twitter might fulfil this need for an immediate response or reaction, but is that true?

I do not think so – we had this great thing, our TU Delft Library is placed 4th (four!) in the top 7 of the coolest libraries in the world. Wow! I read that via twitter (say over a week ago) and a few from us at TU Delft of course retweeted. And is the news then spread? Apparently not. We still get messages (via mail or twitter) of people who just (now) saw this as news. What’s the point?

Getting back to our 2nd @tedxdelft. So I missed apparently interaction “right at the spot”, but how could we accomplish that, if not via twitter? Interaction at the end of normal symposia is often very boring. So what would be a good idea for TEDnext? We all are on the stage, the stage is wherever we are. Hmm, would that help? I am not sure, let’ s give it som rest.

Anyway, it was a wonderful Delft experience, and perhaps we will have flowerish lightbulbs on the grassroof sometime somehow somewhere!

Blog views as per June 25, 2013: 567. After that date post was migrated to this new url.

Fourteen colleagues attended the first Ticer Library Directors’ Course from August 19-21, 2012. The last day was a joined one with the participants of the Ticer Summerschool. We did not have time to evaluate this last day with the fourteen of us, so I decided to provide my summary and short comments on this blog.
Firstly it would be appropriate to mention that I indeed valued the Directors’ course: we had some good practical exercises, a lot of things and literature to think about and work on, perhaps not so many strategy issues as I would have anticipated on the first 2 days, but best of all was that I met new and interesting colleagues and the Course Director, Janet Wilkinson, and senior lecturer Roger Fielding, who both did an excellent job. I will never forget our Marshmallow Challenge!

Lorcan Dempsey introduced the Ticer Tuesday (being its Course Director) and did a quick wrap-up of the talk I enjoyed in Birmingham last February. He introduced David Lankes (@rdlankes, see his own post). This was the talk that I liked best, a bit provocative, typical American, but filling in the gap that I had slightly missed on days 1 and 2. Of course not everything was new, but here are a few quick-and-dirty quotes or lines to remember:
– The mission for the library has not changed over all these years, how we do it has changed.
– What makes it new librarianship is if you realize that knowledge is created through conversation (and not contained in “static” containers).
– As a library we have a voice, if we e.g. give instructions these should be focused on helping the members to learn, not on how they can get access.
– We do not have users, clients or consumers; we have members and they “own” the library and add value to it.
– A place with books is a storage place; a place with librarians is a library.
– A librarian does not need the library building to be a librarian … so a librarian is the one who creates the library.
– We are librarians and we are on a mission. Be radical!
There is a lot I have not put in this summary, a question could be the possible disbalance in the phrases above on “membership or ownership” and “the librarian who creates the library”. Of course we should see this as cocreation, but this puzzles me.

The other three in-depth talks were on Open Access, Research data management and Networks. These were less strategic, but interesting because of the overview we received on the relevant situation, reports and papers. Marc van den Berg had a good interactive voting exercise where all participants had to give theire scores on the ten recommendations the LIBER Working Group on e-Science and Research Data Management had just released. We apparently (and typically?) gave all recommendations almost similar scores. Lorcan Dempsey, in his role as Chair of the day, asked the presenters where they would make their choices in their own libraries, not per se referring to research data management, but in general. The answer to that question remains difficult – I myself would be interested to see whether we in The Netherlands would be able to differentiate between the university libraries the coming years. Further I was triggered by the reference made by Marc on the Gartner hypecycle for education, 2012, where it shows that Digital preservation of research data as a trending topic has had his peak, and could now be overhyped.

At the end of the day we got a Library tour at Tilburg University. Interesting to see that Tilburg invites faculty to come over to the library. Apart from the datalab and teaching lab there is also a dedicated faculty space, only accessible for faculty staff. It is not yet crowded, but a good initiative!

Finally, Rachel L. Frick (https://twitter.com/rlfrick) provoked us to come from our often institutional to a networked focus and gave some good examples how this could work for libraries. We discussed the question she gave us, i.e. if the library is unified by a brand (and then, what is this brand)? Interesting for us in Delft (involved as we are as a Library in social innovation, see the (Dutch) weblog) was the reference she made to the constellation model, often used when organising collaborative efforts.

Blog views as per June 25, 2013: 1837. After that date post was migrated to this new url.

Last week I had an international week, and I did not have to travel any mile for it. On Tuesday we got three visitors from University College London and on Thursday/Friday we had colleagues over from DTU Copenhagen, TIB Hannover and ETH Zurich. It gave me a chance to give two tours through our own library building, which is always useful (e.g. to notice that the printing device of our Library Voyager did not work). Further I could talk both times about our Library Learning Centre, our work on archetypes or persona’s, where we are not “just” involved in accommodating students or student facilities, but are focusing on how we would like to facilitate both work and study the coming years.

Another meeting this week was with TU Delft researchers and administration together about the future of research information, i.e., what we should still register in a local system and what is already available (and harvestable) in the cloud. It is the typical two-step of the library. Of course we are mainly known for our traditional role where we are the content providers (with all related extras, just to name the training, searching, licensing and ordering). Our role in academic visibility is another one, and is more than providing a vehicle for scientific publications. It is really about knowledge exchange, and to progress science. Very interesting discussions!

And for something completely different, a week ago .. at Delft Kennisfestival, nice weather and a funny “swim and water” performance. Roy Heiner was a keynote speaker, just a few translated quotes:

team – together each achieves more

first it is your team, then the individual and finally the context

success is no coincidence

to improve is to allow mistakes

“at the top” you need to dare to take a step

So what about this midyear, midsummer, midnight then? I joined two friends in a bike ride to “Kijkduin” to celebrate Midsummernight with some homemade icetea, a fresh melon, and hot coffee. Pretty basic, one could say. Though we happened to encounter baby swans, a fox, and camels. Life can be full of surprises!

“Be the change you want to see in the world”

Blog views as per June 25, 2013: 2806. After that date post was migrated to this new url.

On May 21 and 22 I attended the general meeting of the COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) in Uppsala. Sweden.

Two things from the first day: first the presentation by Xiaolin Zhang (National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences), on institutional repositories in China, going strong and enriched. They increased in three years from 2 to 72 research institutes, not a giant uptake yet though. He advocates that we should see the institutional repository as a knowledge management services, not just as an open access issue or a library issue. He defines three roles, from high stake risk & task (explaining the researcher or group chair what can be accessed, and how achievements can be demonstrated), to high-level responsibility (for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, for the research institutes) to high-level involvement (both the institutional task as well as the CAS expertise).

Further Ralf Schimmer, from the Max Planck Society, Max Planck Digital Library. At MPS the open access commitment is driven by researchers and research directors, so coming from the heart of the researchers. The whole open access debate should be more than a monetary debate, remember the phrase out of the Berlin declaration, it is about “the full exploitation of the internet”. Ralf also tells us that licensing is more than paying to read! Libraries ought to be the organizers of the economic relationship of their institutions with the publishers, open their perspectives and eyes to accept new concepts. Libraries should not just be organizing access to content, but also be arranging use and re-use, archiving & hosting rights, or open access options. The licensing process is where the organised interests of publishers and research community meet, where services are defined and money transactions are organized. MPS has a unified acquisition and open access publication cost budget since 2005. For MPS open access is sacred, if choices need to be made, they cancel subscriptions not open access activities.

The afternoon of my second day was well spent by an elaborate (I refer to it as slow touring) guided tour through the Uppsala university library by Ulf Goranson. Carolina Rediviva is the oldest university library in Sweden, founded in 1620. The university was also the first one and dates from 1477. And then the Uppsala cathedrale, which is scandinavia’s largest and tallest church (and it is equally tall and long: 118,8 metres).

The library today contains 5 million books – with 700000 books from before 1850 – the duplicates are mainly used for decoration in the (not publicly accessible) library conference rooms.

The “new” library building (beginning 19th century) is an inpractical library building, you are not allowed to take your bags and drinks with you. But at least there is central heating now.

“Each library should have a globe”, says Ulf. And they have many in his library, mainly in the closed areas. In the exhibition area you can find the silver bible which is a Gothic (language) gospel book – the silver refers to the cover, which was made later. The text book is almost 1500 years old.

Ulf showed us (me) how a library director can be a story teller, about the building, the library, the university, the books, the history … really impressive. I invited Ulf over to Delft, but warned him that my stories would be different. His room really belongs to him.

I learned that back in the old days the book were reversely stacked, making it actually easier to open them this way.

At the second day the best experience for me was the rotating workshops where 5 topics were discussed with the same group guided by topic moderators. Perhaps not each workshop (we only had 10 minutes per topic) ended up in creative discussions, but altogether this is a way to get all participants to think and work.

The overview from DRIVER to DRIVER2 to OpenAIRE and OpenAIREplus by Donatella Castelli, CNR, Italy, was very useful. Donatella explained to us that each e-infrastructure can play both provider and consumer roles and that the most effective and sustainable e-infrastructure will survive. DRIVER served mainly the community of researchers (retrieval and access of open access scientific documents). The OpenAIRE pilot and now also OpenAIREplus serves the whole community of actors. Whereas OpenAire concentrated on supporting the open access mandate for peer-reviewed publications and monitoring its impact, OpenAIREplus adds all research outputs, and facilitates the exploitation of these outputs.

Blog views as per June 25, 2013: 2199. After that date post was migrated to this new url.

I attended this conference with two-and-half days of Library lectures, and adjacent an in-depth international meeting of Library directors.

The conference started with Stefan Gradmann from Humboldt University who asked for a new term for the word Library. Librarians should help scientists and scholars with semantic abstracting (enhancing publications via semantic publishing or semantic annotation). Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard from the Royal Library Copenhagen focused my attention for the third time in two months (first one was the Surf Researcher’s Day, second one was discussion at 25th anniversary of IOS Press) on nanopublications: they can help people speedreading, nice explanation I would say. Her talk complemented Stephan’s, where she also emphasized the importance of the quality of the annotation of the data.

A different topic was introduced by Wolfram Neubauer, ETH Zurich, who talked about an organizational change. He very neatly pointed out the importance of the order of these changes, i.e., 1. Discussion of strategy. 2. Definition of product portfolio. 3. Redefinition of process map. 4. New organisational structure. The first talk of the second day, April 25th, also covered change. Jo Richler, from Ciel Associates, UK, had been involved in an embedded change of Sunderland College Library, where people, systems and environment were all tackled. She hammered on measuring value and worth, the latter is often missing in impact measurement.

Of course open access was the topic of the lecture by Alma Swan, from SPARC Europe, Enabling Open Scholarship, and Key Perspectives UK. It was good to have it said again. Open access adds value for the researcher, the institute, science and society. I have not yet spread the following quote she gave, so here it is (from Daniel Coit Gilman, First President of John Hopkins University): ” It is one of the noblest duties of universities to advance knowledge and to diffuse it, not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures, but far and wide”.

The remainder of the day was on data, data and data. From the Dryad Digital Repository, to Data Management Tool DMPTool, DataONE, EUDAT and our own DataCite. Dividing data into temporary data, referable data and citable data (as parts of the data creation cycle). We saw the same arguments as used with open access articles to support open data, i.e., sharing and publishing your data gives high visibility, easy re-use and verification of datasets, and so increases scientific reputation. Articles with data get better cited. Anne E. Trefethen, CIO Oxford, concluded the afternoon with her talk on Drowning in Data, where she told us that everyday life now has a digital footprint. She used a yin-yang picture where data is both the question and the answer. Big data: it is what you do with it that counts (and what others do with it that you didn’t think of). More on data the next day in e.g. the talks by Klaus Tochtermann who showed us how the path has developed from semantic-enhanced retrieval to semantic document representations to semantics in research data management. Philipp Cimiano (from Bielefeld University) made a plea to get data curators in, where curators need to perform knowledge acquisition and choose the correct vocabulary .

Furthermore the Mendeley Institutional Edition (Swets as host) was a new thing for me, not so strange I understood later at the exhibitor’s booth, it has just been introduced. Mendeley (I also mentioned it in my Birmingham blog) helps researchers work smarter. They now have 160 million documents uploaded by 1,6 million users. Nice feature: the reader meter. MIE both improves productivity of the researchers and gives the library real-time visibility. And finally Heiner Stuckenschmidt (CIO at Mannheim University) told us to get applied research in.

My time at Bielefeld had not ended after the last lecture; we continued for an afternoon and a morning with a smaller meeting consisting of library directors from AGUB (German), VOWB (Flemish), and UKB (Dutch). It was good to get to know some more colleagues, exchanging our views on open access, scholarly publishing models, digital collections, repurposing library space and redeploying library staff. Especially the format chosen on Friday morning, where we sat down in small groups in a so-called World Café, where I also got the chance to see the Bielefeld University and Library.

Blog views as per June 25, 2013: 1749. After that date post was migrated to this new url.